Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

Wonder - the sensation of being whisked out of time and space...to be bathed in ... epiphanous delight.

It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn't before.

You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

The Odyssey and Iliad say things about the human condition in ways we should re-acquaint ourselves with, and use as a prism to interpret though.

In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.

One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.

All of the world's religions have important things to teach us, and they are not as different from each other as some would have you believe.

We were created to work (not have jobs) for a living

We are one family.

The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.

I'm not a movie guy. I don't know all this stuff that comes with celebrity. I don't know who the actors will be and stuff like that. But anybody who wants to talk about the issues - that's great.

The problem is that Islam does not have a pope, so there's no one guy to say, 'This isn't kosher'...Not that he would.

Far over misty mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old We must away, ere break of day, To find our long-forgotten gold.

Music is a fair and glorious gift of God. I am strongly persuaded that after theology, there is no art which can be placed on the level with music.

I strain to hear, but my old ears, for all their obscene hugeness, pick up nothing but snippets.

It's amazing how the world does actually go on in the middle of things that should stop it for us.